


Finding A Family

by meils121



Category: Leverage
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Growing Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:28:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26054968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meils121/pseuds/meils121
Summary: There’s a family that lives down the street.  Parker watches them sometimes, hides in the bushes outside their dining room window and hugs Bunny tight against that ache in her chest as she looks at a scene that might as well be in a movie.
Kudos: 23
Collections: The Leverage Exchange Master Collection





	Finding A Family

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maddie_Meraki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maddie_Meraki/gifts).



There’s a family that lives down the street. Parker watches them sometimes, hides in the bushes outside their dining room window and hugs Bunny tight against that ache in her chest as she looks at a scene that might as well be in a movie. The daddy is tall and clean-shaven and he never hits the mommy. Parker likes that. The mommy has washed hair and pearl earrings and never misses dinner because she’s too drugged out of her mind to get up off the couch. Parker likes that too. There are three kids at the table, a baby and a boy Parker’s age and another boy a little older. They have nice smiles and they get full plates of food, every night. Sometimes, when Parker looks at them, she feels this pang of want that she normally only gets about things, not people. 

That’s the family Parker wants to have. But you can’t choose your family. So Parker gets a drunk stepdaddy and a stoned mommy and sometimes there’s food in the cupboards but most of the time there’s not. She gets bruises in places that teachers won’t see and broken arms that she tells the doctors are from falling off her bike. She gets a dark room because mommy didn’t have money to pay the bills because her stepdaddy spent it all last Friday.

And Parker wonders if that’s what she deserves. Maybe she’s not good enough to have a real family. Because good kids don’t steal from the corner store, even if they’re really hungry and their baby brother hasn’t eaten in three days. They don’t steal money out of their stepdaddy’s pocket when he’s sleeping off five too many drinks. 

And they definitely don’t run away and burn their house down behind them.

So Parker thinks she must be a bad kid. That’s certainly what one foster home after another calls her, throwing out words like troubled and broken and too much work. Parker learns that foster parents don’t like being called into the school office because she beat up someone who was teasing her baby brother. Good girls don’t get into fights. That’s what everyone tells her. Parker thinks about that perfect family and knows that they are right. She doesn’t fit into pretend families. She’d never fit into a real one.

All Parker has is her brother, but two lost, scared little kids don’t make a family. They just bounce from one foster family to another, never fitting in. Eventually Parker stops wanting to fit in. She knows now, knows for certain that she doesn’t deserve a real family.

Things get worse after the accident. Parker doesn’t have a baby brother to protect anymore, but she still fights at school. She doesn’t like seeing all those perfect kids going about their perfect lives. Eventually the foster homes don’t want to take her anymore. It doesn’t matter that Parker’s a mess of grief and fear and little-kid-worries. They just see her as a problem to be shoved at someone else. 

Parker doesn’t even know where they buried her brother.

She runs away again, finds the sort of people that don’t care how old she is or how messed up her head is. They teach her how to boost cars and how to hide from cops and how to protect herself in a world that doesn’t have time to miss one messed-up kid. Parker thinks for a while that maybe this is her family. But families aren’t supposed to rat each other out. They aren’t supposed to leave you behind when things get bad. That’s what happens, though, and Parker’s old enough now that she knows no family will ever want her. She ends up in juvie for a total of three hours before she escapes. 

New York is unlike anything Parker has ever seen. It’s easy here, easy to fade into the background of other people’s busy lives and just exist. Parker doesn’t trust people anymore. She stays alive by pickpocketing rich businessmen and clueless tourists. She learns that money is the only constant in her life, the only thing she can rely on. She sleeps in abandoned warehouses and tries not to cry at night when being all alone gets scary. If she had a family, maybe things would be different. But she doesn’t have a family, never will, and so she cries herself to sleep and wakes up with tear tracks on her face and dirt on her clothes. That’s the way it is. 

She doesn’t trust Archie when she meets him. He’s strange. He’s the first adult who ever told her that she could be a better thief instead of scolding her or dragging her to the nearest cop. That’s weird. Parker doesn’t know if she likes it or not. It saves her from escaping police custody, but it makes her worried that she’s run into someone she can’t escape from. Maybe Archie is just a smart version of her stepdaddy. 

But he isn’t. He’s not kind, not exactly, but he teaches her things. Good things, things Parker never thought of before. She goes from breaking into cars and lifting wallets to twisting her way through laser grids and stealing jewelry right off of someone’s neck. She’s having fun for the first time in a long time. 

Still, Archie isn’t family. He makes that perfectly clear one night when Parker asks if she can crash at his place for the night. She’s still living on the street, mostly, only now it’s cold enough that she’s started spending nights at homeless shelters. But those aren’t safe for a kid who’s barely a teenager. They have social workers who ask questions about kids her age who come in alone. Parker’s not ready to answer those questions. She’ll never be, she thinks, so she asks Archie.

The answer’s no, and Parker knows it as soon as the question is out of her mouth. Archie just shakes his head and says he can’t have his family knowing about her. And that’s when Parker learns that she doesn’t belong in families. Nobody wants her, not even another thief. She and Archie part ways soon after. Parker steals enough money to get herself down to Florida for the rest of winter. Miami turns out to be a good place to steal things. 

Parker spends years by herself. Sure, Archie will show up every once in a while with a job that needs two people, but she’s still by herself. Archie’s careful now, watches her like he’s worried she’s going to try and worm her way into his carefully constructed life. She won’t though, because Parker understands. Families are for people who are better than her. She was never meant to have one. 

Except - she finds one. It’s strange, and definitely not normal, and made up of people that Parker isn’t totally sure about at first, but it’s her family. It’s a good family, too. She’s got a mentor who doesn’t tell her she’s not wanted. She’s got friends who look out for her, who watch her back in situations where she can’t. 

She learns that families take care of each other. She learns that families can fight and still love each other. She learns that bad things don’t feel quite as bad when there are other people to share the burden with. It’s - it’s wonderful.

Maybe Parker wasn’t meant to have a family, but she found one anyways. She’s okay with that. Actually, she’s happy. She loves her weird family of good-hearted criminals. She’s got her family, and that’s what she’s wanted all along.


End file.
